My Favourite Movie

My cinematography professor played this scene from The Piano for us in class last Thursday and I just wanted to get up and hug him. “This scene!” I wanted to shout. “In the whole wide world you chose this scene! I love you!” Instead I sat there squirming with excitement as he talked to us about wide-angle lenses, telephoto lenses... how we realize, simply from that pan across the piano to Harvey Keitel’s boots in the sand, and the tilt up to his watchful gaze, that he is falling in love with Ada through listening to her music. Out in the desolate wilderness of New Zealand, he has never seen anyone making this kind of music before, and it’s almost a shock. Cut to Holly Hunter breaking into her first real, radiant, smile of the film: a peek into the true, inner Ada, practically a different person. Cinematography as story-telling.
The first time I saw The Piano, I liked it well enough but didn’t love it. I could sense that it was aesthetically pleasing but something unknowable at the core of it, something difficult and hard to grasp, muddled me and held me at a distance. A couple years later I saw it again and that was when I found myself inexplicably crying. Not because it’s so terribly sad, but because suddenly I was old enough to (subconsciously) pick up the meanings and emotions Campion discreetly pushes you towards, and it was almost a shock. I still didn’t fully get it but that certain ineffability made it even more alluring.
One more viewing later and I still don’t fully get it; there are so many dimensions to it that I will probably only be able to read in another 5, 10, 20 years’ time. But I’m so glad that I took this class because even just those few minutes he spent talking to us, made me understand that much more the mysterious ways this movie works and why I find it so affecting. And I can’t wait until the next time I see it so I can try to figure it out all over again.